Ken's Comments

This week President Biden gave a speech reviewing his legacy in the White House.  Biden talked about the good he's done.  I have a different perspective, I see the deaths and damage that occurred in the last four years. Covid - more people died of Covid in 2021, when Biden was in office, than died in 2020, when Trump was in office.*  In 2020, the disease was new and testing was ramping up, treatment protocols were being developed, medical supplies like ventilators were in short supply, and multiple Democrat run States put in place nursing home rules that led to significant numbers of deaths.  In 2021, those nursing home rules were no longer in place, multiple vaccines were available, testing and supply issues had been overcome.  Despite those advantages, more people died of Covid in President Biden's first year in office. The Border - Laken Riley, Rebecca Morin, Jeremy Poou Caceres (a 2 year old boy), Rachel Morin, Melissa Powell and her son Riordan Powell, Ai...

Almost anyone will tell you there are stark differences between Democrats and President Donald Trump.  I thought I'd call out some differences in a way that I have not seen anyone else do.  Two comparisons, one looking "back" to compare what the Democrats did to stimulate the economy under President Obama versus what President Trump did.  The other comparison looks forward - what is President Trump promising to do on the subject of jobs versus what the Democrat candidates for President are promising to do if they are elected.  But let's start with the look back. In 2009, President Barack Obama was sworn into office and joining him was a huge Democrat majority in the U.S. House and a "filibuster-proof" majority in the U.S. Senate.  Upon taking office, President Obama and the Democrats were faced with an economy in shambles.  They made it a top priority to develop and pass legislation in 2009 to stimulate the economy. In 2016, President Trump was sworn in...

The biggest contributors to the causes of climate change today are second and third world countries.  The Paris plan for addressing climate change gave those countries a grace period while placing a greater burden on developed countries like the United States. Americans have argued against that accord asking why those who are doing the most polluting make the least contributions to fixing the problem.  The argument made by the second and third world countries is that they are johnny come latelies to polluting the world.  It was the Western countries who created the situation first, with excessive pollution from the mid-1800s through the late 1900s.  They should not suffer the biggest burden of cleaning up while the original contributors go scot free. If I were running the US, what I'd propose is a multi-billion dollar aid package to second and third world countries.  We'll pay a significant percentage of the cost of buying what you need to clean up your coun...

Talk to me about the environment.  Climate change fanatics focus on how the oceans will rise a half inch 50 years from now and how the economy will collapse 100 years from now.  Some of the claims are hard to believe, particularly any economic projections that far in advance, and the messaging of this has been poorly done and divisive.  What people should be talking about, and what I would be interested in, is the environment that exists right now.  People can see those problems and we can personally do something about them right now and this can be explained in a way that unites rather than divides people.  It makes me wonder why the people concerned about climate change people didn't start or stay there. Perhaps that's a reason why I have so little interest in climate change.  The environment used to be important.  Then there was a hue and cry about the Ozone layer being depleted and how soon the Earth would die from that.  Then the crisis bec...

The corporate tax rates in the U.S. are the highest in the industrial world.  The tax code is ridiculously complex.  Business decisions are made half based on what is good for the business and half based on what enables the company to reduce taxes. Is it any wonder that companies are leaving America to evade taxes?  Companies are using a process called inversion to transform themselves from American companies to foreign companies, moving to countries with lower taxes. The ones that aren't leaving are investing money made off shore into plants and R&D in other countries because taxes on bringing the money back to the US make that impossible. So what do you do to stop this exodus?  Well Hilary Clinton's idea is to make the tax code worse not better.  She wants to create a penalty to deter companies from leaving the US. Gee whiz.  Great idea.  Don't take the simple approach of making the tax code simpler and lowering taxes.  Oh no, keep...

A very interesting story from the NY Times about the crisis looming ahead thanks to the Bush / Obama economic recovery plan. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/business/23rates.html?th&emc=th Essentially, the Bush / Obama economic recovery plan is a lot like taking out an adjustable rate mortgage with really low teaser interest rates. When interest rates go up, the Federal government is going to be slammed. The NY Times - not what I'd call a conservative news outlet - article has a quote estimating that interest payments on the money we've borrowed will be as much as $700 billion per year in the future. That is as much as we spent this year on the economic stimulus bill and we will be paying that each year. Now, just to review, what is Bush / Obama economic recovery plan? It involves spending lots and lots of money that the Government does not have including: Economic stimulus - $400 billion under President Bush if I recall correctly, repeated by President Obama at a higher ...

I've been good at criticizing what is wrong with the economy, let me take a moment and say what I would have done differently to try to prevent us from getting to where we are right now. The answer starts in the approach - I would have attacked the problem from the bottom up, not the top down. There are a number of steps that could have been taken back when all this started to isolate the economic harm and create a gradual downturn instead of what did happen, which resulted in the economy falling off a cliff. This would not have been without pain, but a lot of the pain would have been absorbed by the lender, borrowers, and investors who took agreed to the risk of pain in the hope of financial reward. However, I think the result would have been fewer foreclosures and less people out of work. Ironically, both the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration have talked about trying to reduce foreclosures, but neither has any significant accomplishments. That's because th...

If it was not so tragic, I'd have to laugh at the people who are talking about a "jobless recovery" like it is a good thing. I've only seen one mainstream commentator - a former Clinton Administration official - come close to calling out the Obama Administration on the current economy. Instead you've got papers like the New York Times running articles saying that because there were not as many new people unemployed in the last reporting it is a sign of an improving economy. Why can't we call it like it is - all of the money the Government has spent over the last two years, under both President Bush and President Obama is only making the rich richer and it is not helping the little guys. Merrill Lynch, AIG, and Goldman Sachs pay out big bonuses to employees. Warren Buffet makes a mint off of investments he made into companies that got government support. People who can afford to invest a lot of money in the stock market are doing very well again. Chrysler...

The common result of a government spending more money than it earns is devaluation of its currency. The US government's deficit increased during the Bush Administration. The Democrats and the Obama Admiminstration lifted that deficit to an enormous new level. A common effect of currency devaluation is inflation. In a bad economy, that is going to be a real problem - just ask people who lived through the Jimmy Carter Administration. First of all, let's spread this blame in a non-partisan fashion. Republicans during the Bush Adminstration years controlled Congress and the White House and they showed no fiscal discipline. The Bush Administration capped this by spending a ton of money in 2008 to try to prevent or curtail the recession - first having a stimulus tax cut at the beginning of the year and then approving the TARP bailout funds - easily a trillion dollars spent last year to prevent the recession. Now, we have the Obama Administration spending another trillion dollars for ...

Denials by President Obama to the contrary, I have some real questions about this Administration's micromanagement of the businesses to whom they are lending taxpayer dollars. Some things they are doing make sense and are consistent with the way business normally operates. But there are a number of things this Administration is doing which exceed the boundaries of normal operations and some are both scary and can create further economic calamity. Unfortunately, no one in the "main stream media" (e.g. not labeled conservatives) are challenging the President on this. Let's start by giving credit, where credit is due - President Bush started us down this path with the bailout of AIG, the $700 million for banks under TARP, and the decision to lend money to the auto makers. President Obama is carrying on programs that President Bush started. Second, if the government is going to provide money to companies then the Government, like any lender, has the right to try to p...

Earlier some Republican Governors announced they would decline Federal Stimulus funds and the media and political opponents were highly critical. The State of PA is quietly considering whether to do the same thing. The Philadelphia Inquirer does a nice job of laying out the issues that point to why a state should consider rejecting "free money" to help unemployed workers. The gist of the Inquirer article (cited below) is essentially this - the PA Unemployment Fund is broke. The downturn in the economy has outstripped the funds available. A panel was appointed to figure out what to do. One of the things they were asked to consider is whether the state should accept $273 million in federal funds from the Stimulus package. Why would PA, or any state, reject free money from the federal government? Well primarily because it is not free. It will cost the Pennsylvania $300 million to get $273 million in federal funds. As the Inquirer article does a good job of describing, to ...

I was moved to post my thoughts on President Obama's economic policies in order to, in some small way, counter the comments of pro-Obama media persons. Specifically, Janeane Garofalo ranted (I believe on MSNBC) that everyone who opposed President Obama is a racist. She said a lot of other things derogatory about such opponents too -- tea-bagging, rednecks I think was another term used. Paul Begala, a CNN commentator, said on the Don Imus radio show that everyone who opposed President Obama's tax policies were unpatriotic. He added a variety of other derogatory comments as well. Well, if not wanting to see a return to the economic conditions that existed during the period of 1979 to 1982 makes me a racist or unpatriotic, then so be it. Unfortunately, pro-Obama commentators don't seem to want to discuss rational arguments, they just want to resort to name calling. p.s. Page back to my discussion of what is a conservative point of view if you wonder why I say "Pro-Obama...

I am very concerned that the President's policies are going to lead this country into more serious economic problems than we have today. This is not to say that all aspects of the Obama Administration's policies are wrong. However, the fundamental premise of these policies is wrong. I have not heard anyone in the Obama Administration admit the difficult truth that the economy is changing nor does it seem that the goals they are pursuing reflect that. If the economy does not recover along the lines they project, then the massive expenditures being made will come home to roost in the former of significant inflation. The Obama Administration has called for spending massive amounts of money over the next few years. These amounts will raise the national debt to staggering new levels. Some of the things they are spending on are good ideas -- green technology, improving the environment, more mass transit, supporting Amtrak. All of these are good ideas. However these are merely...

If you're waiting for a miraculous economic recovery don't hold your breath. I think we are seeing the economy contract after 15 years of false prosperity. Spending next year could cause the economic downturn to level out and perhaps even put us on the road to positive growth. But things are not going to get back to where they were for a long time. In some ways, that is probably a good thing, too. Since the adoption of the laws in 1994 causing the lending industry to lower its stanards for issuing mortgages, I think the economy has grown at a rate faster than it should have grown. This has not entirely been due to the mortgage situation. Recall that we had the "Dot Com" bubble in the late '90s. We also had major companies falsifying their financial records - remember Enron, MCI, Adelphia Cable to name a few - to create significantly higher stock prices. All of this translated into higher salaries, bonuses, and wealth for many people. After the dot com bubble burst...

Remember when Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber used the "S" word (Socialism) in the election? The media was up in arms. Yet she was not far off, just perhaps Gov. Palin and Joe the Plumber were labeling the wrong person. Consider this story from the NY Times today titled Detroit Bailout is set to bring on more U.S. oversight which says: "Congressional Democrats were drafting legislation Sunday for tight government control of the crippled American auto industry, including the possible creation of an oversight board made up of five cabinet secretaries and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency and led by an independent chairman or “car czar.” "Tight government control..." and "...oversight board..." If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck... According to the article, this legislation is being negotiated with President Bush. Let's see where he stands on the idea of the Government having tight control over an indus...

I watched Sen. Barack Obama give a presentation on Friday, around mid-day. He was speaking on the Bush Administration's actions to help bail out the banking situation. I have to give credit to Sen. Obama. He did not politicize the situation, when he could have. Rather he said that he has been in contact with the Secy. of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and he, Sen. Obama, was just going to monitor the situation to wait for the specifics of the plan being developed. That was a very statesmanlike position on his part. I think it was appropriate, given all the panic that had been happening and the uncertainty. It would have been easy for Sen. Obama to try to score points, but that would not have been good for the U.S. during a time of real uncertainty. I did not see or hear any reaction from Sen. McCain, so I cannot comment on what he did or said. However, I think we need to give credit when credit is due.